Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit

by Robert F. Kennedy

  In truth, Tommy was a far more compelling suspect than Ed Hammond, and a far, far more plausible culprit than Michael ever was. Tommy didn’t kill Martha, and his alibi is nearly as solid as Michael’s, but it’s understandable why he became the patsy. Tommy was the last person to see Martha alive. Tommy, who had been caught telling lies to the cops, had personality quirks that helped make him a long-term scapegoat. Probably as a result of the suspicion that shadowed him since age 17, Tommy is guarded, enigmatic, and opaque, and therefore less sympathetic than his transparent, cringingly open-hearted and garrulous younger brother. Tommy has been beaten down for so long by suspicion, judgment, and accusations that he rarely bothers to defend himself. For a quarter-century, his criminal lawyer chastised Tommy to never speak about the murder and as a result, silence has become muscle memory. When he ought to explain himself, he doesn’t. For that reason, Tommy has never been a good advocate for Tommy. He’s likely to meet an accusation with dead air, a response people understandingly interpret as affirmation.

  In the early 1980s just after Michael had gotten out of Élan, Michael and Tommy flew with Uncle Rucky aboard the GLC Convair to Las Vegas on a two-day stopover for a little rest and relaxation. Michael found himself alone with Tommy at Caesar’s Palace. “Tommy,” Michael said, “if you did this, I forgive you, and I still love you.”

  I asked Michael how Tommy responded. “He didn’t say anything to me. He just sat in silence.” Tommy’s life has been nearly as devastated as Michael’s. Although he didn’t go to jail, he spent a quarter-century as the police’s prime suspect, with even his closest relatives not knowing what to think.

  But before they got to Tommy, Greenwich cops had to leapfrog some other compelling suspects.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Brother

  If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

  —Mark Twain

  Had some Moxley aunt married into the Kennedy family, Jonathan Benedict could have brought a far more convincing case against Martha Moxley’s brother, John, than his confused and wobbly prosecution of Michael Skakel. Benedict would have been able to appropriate the blueprint for his prosecution from a Sutton Associates report like the one he turned against Michael. A 23-year-old Sutton employee named Jamie Bryan wrote a scathing “Worst Case Scenario” report on John Moxley, far more damning than his companion report on Michael that became the basis for Mark Fuhrman’s book and subsequently for Benedict’s prosecution. The band of bards who cashed in on Michael’s misfortune—Dunne, Fuhrman, and Levitt (and his silent partner, Garr)—presumably had John Moxley’s “Worst Case Scenario” in their possession, yet none of them has ever acknowledged its existence. The Sutton report, which distills the Greenwich Police files, shows that the police were, after all, guilty of putting the brakes on the investigation of a wealthy Belle Haven family. But that family was the Moxleys, not the Skakels.

  Out of solicitude for their tragedy, Greenwich Police gave wide berth to the Moxleys. Anybody can understand why, but veteran detectives consider courtesies to the victim’s family one of the most perilous pitfalls of rookie homicide investigators. Department of Justice homicide data show that in incidents in which victims knew their killers, between 24 and 30 percent of perpetrators were family members. While police questioned Ed Hammond and the Skakel children about three hours after Sheila McGuire discovered Martha’s body, they did not interview John Moxley until 10:00 a.m. on November 1, nearly 24 hours later. In recounting his Mischief Night timetable, John said that, following an evening with friends, he returned home at 11:20 p.m.

  Five days later, Steve Carroll interviewed Theresa Tirado, a housekeeper who had worked for the Moxleys for a year. Tirado told Carroll that she arrived for work at 8:00 a.m. on October 31, 1975, four hours before the discovery of Martha’s body. Dorthy Moxley told Tirado not to clean John’s room because he was sleeping late. A short time later, Tirado passed by John’s room on the second floor; his door was open, the bed empty. “Theresa further related that at 9:00 a.m., while in the living room of the Moxley house, she heard a loud crash in the basement,” according to the report. Tirado first saw John at 9:15 a.m., when his friend, later identified as John Harvey, appeared at the house.

  Martha now had been missing for 12 hours and Belle Haven was in a state of fearful chaos as neighbors and their children frantically searched for the missing girl. Nevertheless, John and his friend were serenely detached. Tirado related that the pair remained in the living room watching TV until about 11:00 a.m., “and then both left and went out the back door to the wooded area behind the house.” This was precisely the area where Sheila would discover Martha’s body an hour later. The boys returned to the house a few minutes later and then drove off in Moxley’s car. After the two boys left, Tirado cleaned the TV room where she “observed, on one of the tables, what appeared to be smears of blood as if from three fingers,” the report read. “She did not think anything of this and cleaned it up.” In a case in which police discovered no blood evidence outside the crime scene, the discovery of a bloody handprint in the victim’s home was consequential. Remember, police also found blood smears on Martha’s thighs, suggesting that the murderer’s hands were blood-soaked.

  Even after Carroll’s interview of Tirado, police did not rush over to inspect the house and search for blood and fingerprints. Instead, Detective Tom Keegan invited John Moxley to the station for an interview. That delay provided plenty of time to hide evidence and wipe the scene. John recounted that he had fallen asleep at about midnight. Around 3:30 a.m. on Friday morning, his mother woke him in a panic that Martha had not come home. After dressing, he went on a two-hour hunt in his Mustang that carried him far from Belle Haven. “His search also took him to Riverside, Cos Cob, and the Bruce Park areas of town,” the report read. “He completed his search at about 6:00 a.m.” Rather than go up to his room when he returned home, John slept in the TV room where Tirado would later find the bloody handprint. John told Keegan he saw no blood. The smear, he guessed, was probably food, since the whole family used the TV room. It’s unlikely, however, that the red handprint was from another family member: John’s father was out of town and Martha hadn’t been inside the house since late afternoon the previous day. The banging in the basement? John had no idea. Neither he, nor his guest, John Harvey, “were using the weights in the weight lifting room and he could not recall either one of them picking up a weight and dropping it by accident, but added that it could have happened.” Harvey, he said, came by at 9:00 a.m. If Harvey had come to assist in the search, the mission was notably devoid of urgency. “Both he and Harvey watched some television, and after securing the TV set, he and Harvey left the house and went to a wooded area at the rear of the residence,” Keegan’s report read. “Their reason was to check behind an eight-foot wall, directly to the rear of the house, which had a large pile of brush. After checking, they returned to the house.”

  When they finally got around to checking the Moxley house interior a week after Martha’s murder, the search was cursory and slipshod. Greenwich Police Sergeant Roland Hennessy ambled over at 11:00 a.m. and offered this indifferent report: “With the permission of Mr. J. David Moxley the undersigned checked the entire basement of the Moxley residence, with negative results.” Hennessey doesn’t report even visiting the TV room, where Tirado spotted the blood smears.

  John’s odd account hiked eyebrows among the distinguished former G-men and other homicide investigators at Sutton Associates.

  “John told the police they went out behind the house to look for Martha in a ‘brush pile,’” the Sutton report concluded. “On the surface, this is a slightly strange inclination—not to mention an unlikely place to find one’s sister. Furthermore, if John was making even a mildly concerted effort at looking around the property for his sister, it borders on the incredible that he never noticed Martha’s body, lying only yards away to the side of the house,” and a few feet from where the pair had walked during their abbreviated se
arch. His search effort was both strikingly lackadaisical and narrowly specific. John’s reconstruction of his morning search suggested to Sutton’s Jim Murphy that John might have been leading his friend to Martha’s body, a common pattern when one family member murders another. For this reason, trained murder investigators carefully monitor search parties. “Whenever a wife, or husband, or a child is missing and a family member organizes, and then joins, a search party, you often see that family member leading the search party right to the body,” Murphy explains. “They can’t stand the thought of animals getting to the body. That’s what I thought might have been going on here.”

  John’s narrowly targeted brush pile search wasn’t the only thing that got Murphy thinking John might have suspicious knowledge. Sutton used hypnosis to clarify dim recollections and ensure truthful responses. Sutton retained world-class forensic hypnotist Dr. Nancy Vrechek to excavate 20-year-old memories. Under hypnosis in 1994, Julie Skakel offered an eerie account of a pre-dawn meeting with John Moxley. After a series of increasingly desperate calls from Dorthy Moxley, Julie answered the ringing phone yet again around 3:30 a.m. Mrs. Moxley told her that John was outside searching, and asked Julie to help him.

  DR. VRECHEK: So you went outside and met John. Was that the first time you’ve met him?

  JULIE: I’m not sure. I had seen him. I may have met him once briefly.

  DR. VRECHEK: What did you do then? What was John Moxley doing?

  JULIE: We started yelling Martha’s name at the pool, since we were standing right there. I started feeling ridiculous because John wanted me to go … across Walsh Lane onto his property and look for her. And it didn’t make sense.

  DR. VRECHEK: Because?

  JULIE: Because if she were in the area, she would have heard us calling. And if she were with someone, she wasn’t about to answer.

  DR. VRECHEK: Why would she be with someone? Well, why would she not answer?

  JULIE: Well, if she had been with a boy and didn’t want her brother to know.

  DR. VRECHEK: It didn’t make sense that he wanted you to go across to the Moxley property to look for Martha?

  JULIE: I just remember going across their front lawn and along the side of their yard. I think I said something like she’s not around here. It seems senseless to keep calling her name since our properties were so close.

  Julie told me she didn’t tell Greenwich Police this story in 1975 because they never asked her. “They just kind of asked the same pro forma set of questions to everybody and there was never any probing or any curiosity about anything outside of that framework; they were checking off boxes. There were many things I didn’t tell them about that night because they never asked.” Julie repeats the story she told Vrechek. “I can remember locating him by the ash on his cigarette,” she says. “He was standing on Walsh Lane, which is between our properties, and I remember seeing his lit cigarette coming over to our property, and the pool is right there and very meekly he’s like, ‘Martha? Martha are you there?’ It was almost a whisper. It was spooky. Then he leads me over to his property. He starts bringing me towards the real wooded part. I got really, really scared and I just said, ‘I have to go’ and I turned and I walked away very fast.” In retrospect, I asked Julie what she thought John was doing. “He was leading me right over to the tree,” she says. “It was the creepiest thing. He definitely was leading me directly toward that pine tree where they found her body. It was bizarre.”

  John gave interviews to Sutton investigators in the 1990s. He blew his top when he heard Julie’s account, saying that she made it up and none of it took place. According to the Sutton memo: “[John Moxley] was advised that Julie, twice, under hypnosis, stated that she met him at about 3:30 that morning and that they did look for Martha. John is willing to take a polygraph examination on this and other issues regarding the night of October 30, 1975.” Julie is similarly adamant. “I’ll take a lie detector test, absolutely without a doubt,” she says.

  I asked Murphy for his thoughts. Particularly, I wanted to know if it was possible that Julie could have imagined or invented this story, and if it is difficult to lie under hypnosis. “If you have a good hypnotist, it is,” Murphy says. Vrechek, he said, was the best. “She’d be able to tell when someone is not being truthful.” As for the story, he doesn’t think it sounds like something a person without a background in criminology would invent. “I think that’s pretty sophisticated casting of a doubt for Julie to figure out,” he says. “I don’t know that she would know that this is typical of somebody who has killed a member of their family.”

  John’s chronicle of his night has varied considerably over the years. On the stand, Dorthy Moxley testified that she woke her son at 1:30 a.m., two hours earlier than John told police in 1975. She said that she only began her frantic telephone calls after he returned from a short search. John was out, she testified, “not too long as I recall.” Mrs. Moxley may not have been a particularly good witness. According to the Sutton report, “Mrs. Moxley is alleged to have been intoxicated on the night in question.” According to Tirado’s recounting of the morning of October 31, Mrs. Moxley told her not to clean John’s room because he was sleeping late. John told police that after returning from his search he never went back to bed, and instead collapsed on the TV room sofa. Six days after the murder, John detailed for police an extensive rambling patrol, lasting over two hours, spanning the remote outposts of Greenwich, and ending at 6:00 a.m. When prosecutors questioned him on the stand, however, John’s peregrinations had contracted, dramatically, in length and scope. “I got in the car and drove around the neighborhood and, you know, I didn’t think it was a big deal so I drove around for 15 minutes and came home and went back to bed.” In 1975, he told cops that he’d pretty much been up all night. Now he was testifying to only being up for a quarter-hour and sleeping in his bedroom. Commensurate revisions by Tommy and Michael made them murder suspects.

  To police in 1975, John described his early evening on October 30—the period before his 11:20 p.m. return home—as a wholesome evening. He’d picked up his friends John Harvey and Vinnie Cortese. The trio went to the A&P grocery store, then on to Greenwich High School, where they watched preparations for the weekend’s pep rally. Next, they went to the Dairy Queen, a local roost for teens. From there, they drove to the Greenwich Civic Center, and then returned to the ice cream parlor. After that, he dropped Cortese and then Harvey at their houses and arrived home at around 11:20 p.m. John acknowledged an alibi gap in this timeline, when he disappeared on a mysterious detour in his own car. “John stated that he had been separated from Vinnie and John Harvey for a short time, when he left the high school and arrived at the Dairy Queen.” The Greenwich Police never questioned John Moxley about the specific time of this separation. Police did not seem curious to know if John’s alibi gap spanned the 9:45 to 10:15 p.m. period when Martha was bludgeoned to death. Police never determined the duration of his disappearance, or the name of the driver who transported his friends from the school to his alleged rendezvous at Dairy Queen. Later information cast doubt on whether he and the boys went to Dairy Queen at all.

  Harvey’s recollections of the night were similar to John’s, but Harvey switched a detail that signaled John’s whole alibi would soon unravel. Rather than a visit to the civic center, Harvey told police they’d gone to a party on Cognewaugh Road in Cos Cob, Connecticut. The Sutton team wondered whether John Moxley wanted to conceal from cops he’d been drinking beer, or something more sinister? The police report noted that Detective Joe McGlynn had reached out to Vinnie Cortese. There are no notes from the interview in the file. My detective, Larry Holifield, reached Cortese, who gave an account of the evening considerably different than Moxley’s and Harvey’s. He said Moxley, Harvey, and he were among a gang of 10 or 15 guys who started out Mischief Night near the football field. Later, he, Moxley, and Harvey drove around in Cortese’s car, engaging in light hooliganism (egg throwing and the like).

  By trial, Moxle
y’s account of the evening was vague, shuffled, and incomplete. “I went out with a bunch of friends,” John testified. “We used to hang out at the Dairy Queen. Then we went to the high school for a little while. There was a group of people preparing for a pep rally for the weekend for the football game and then I came home.” True to form, Sherman let the inconsistencies slide.

  John’s actions the next morning, October 31, raised suspicions at Sutton. They had already flagged the odd brush pile search as an area for inquiry, but John seemed to dissemble when detectives asked about that morning. “In one of his recent interviews with Sutton Associates, John said, curiously, that it was not John Harvey, but someone named John Anthony who arrived that morning for a visit.” The Sutton investigators wondered if Moxley was deliberately altering his friend’s name in order to misdirect Sutton out of fear that the trained homicide detective would find and question Harvey with the professional rigor the Greenwich PD lacked. By the time of Michael’s trial, both the brush pile search and John Harvey had vanished altogether from John’s testimony. “Woke up, had breakfast,” he testified. “My mom told me that Martha still wasn’t back, started to get nervous about that. We had a walk-through football practice. It was earlier that day than what it would be if we had school. So I left and went to football practice.”

  Holifield tracked down John Harvey, who confirmed the early-morning brush-pile search. This is from Holifield’s report: “He and John spent about 15–20 minutes walking around the Moxley property, mostly in the backyard area. They also walked briefly in the front yard passing by the driveway near the spruce tree where Martha’s body was located shortly after noon. Harvey had no explanation for why they didn’t see Martha’s body, but believed it was there at the time.”